The making of a 'cudologist

...or...how I learned to stop worrying and love the toothy ones...

(...and got a doctorate, as a result!...)

Many people have written to me as a result of perusing my pages (that sat for several years in a just-about-completed state) — a great bonus of putting this barracuda information on the Web. Many have asked me what led me to study barracuda in the first place or, more broadly, why I got into the field I'm in. Quite a few people, especially younger folk, were also looking for information about how to become a marine biologist, so here's a Reader's Digest version of my own path to that arena.

As a child, I spent a great deal of my time in, on and under the sea around my native New Zealand. One burning ambition that I held through adulthood (such as it is) was to dive on a coral reef. Thanks largely to the late Jacques Cousteau's television epics, the National Geographic Society's excellent magazine and television enterprises, the writings of New Zealand diver and author Wade Doak, the exploits of intrepid diving scientist Walter Starck, and Willard Price's adventure books, I finally found myself, at the ripe old age of 28, hovering over a beautiful reef in the Florida Keys. I have since managed to spend a disproportionate amount of time in the same kind of habitats (never as much time as I would like, of course!), and I am yet to be bored by the surroundings.

Soon after entering graduate school at the University of Georgia, I defined a nice research project focusing on darters — small, colorful fishes that reach quite a diversity in North Georgia streams. Not long after, undoubtedly as the result of some unearthly vision (the exact nature of which now escapes me), I abruptly decided to conduct my research in the warm waters of Florida's Dry Tortugas National Park rather than in a chilly North Georgia stream. The revelation that a drysuit would be necessary to ward off the effects of meter-deep cold, clear, mountain water — and that even a cheap one would cost me more than my tuition — undoubtedly had much to do with the decision. For my graduate research project I wanted to focus on a piscivorous (fish-eating) fish. Piscivores have generally not received the same kind of attention as have their prey. As would be amply demonstrated to me, this imbalance probably had much to do with the logistic and practical difficulties in studying large piscivores in their complex natural habitats.

The behavioral ecology of great barracuda had been largely neglected by scientists, the prime exceptions being a very enjoyable 1918 paper (that contains some rambling, and very informative, natural history observations delivered in a very wordy and personal style of the kind discouraged in modern scientific publication) and an extensive study from 1963, by Donald de Sylva, that focused more on topics other than behavior. I was a bit skeptical about the idea of chasing barracuda around but, after some preliminary observations in the Florida Keys, became hooked on the species. Definitely no pun intended. I still haven't quite made it to the Dry Tortugas, despite many potential opportunities, including working on two television projects that looked as if they were heading that way

Despite the observational difficulties in dealing with a highly cryptic, intimidating fish that has the ability to rocket beyond my visual range at any time, I found myself drawn quickly into the realm of 'cudology, finding that I had the field pretty much to myself. Soon, however, I heard from a scientist who was studying a pelagic, schooling species around the Azores — it's nice to have some company! More recently, I've also met someone in the Florida Keys — who works for the Florida Marine Research Institute — whose field research includes great barracuda, and a Masters student at the University of South Florida whose study on feeding morphology includes great barracuda. Still, it looks like our club is a pretty small one. This is not a particularly unusual circumstance, because only a few of the fishes in the world's oceans have been studied at all, and many are yet to be properly described. Nevertheless, I was truly amazed that such a widespread and abundant fish as the great barracuda — ranking second only to sharks in its place in the collective imagination of divers in most tropical and subtropical localities — should be so poorly known to scientists.

In 1993, I took my research questions to the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I was able to work around the relatively undeveloped island of South Caicos, while based as Visiting Scientist at the School for Field Studies. As is often the case in such studies, I came away with yet more questions. Further work in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and the teeming reefs of Papua New Guinea lead me to suspect that barracuda may remain in my life for a long time to come.